Paradigmatic Assumptions when using Video for Teacher Learning 

When teacher educators decide to use video to facilitate learning experiences for pre-service or in-service teachers, their paradigmatic assumptions come into play when designing, implementing, and possibly researching that process. From his review of research on the use of video to foster teacher learning, Brouwer (2022) argues that cognitivist, interpretivist, and sociocultural are three major paradigms that guide the study of teacher learning with video.

Cognitivist paradigm	Interpretivist paradigm	Sociocultural paradigm
Video observation activities generally aim to promote teachers’ selective attention and interpretation of students’ thinking. According to Brouwer (2022), research on this type of intervention “appears to assume a unidirectional relationship between thought and action, implying that training the perception of instruction should by itself enable teachers to enact effective instruction” (p. 103).	Video experiences place the teacher’s personal experience at the center of the observation and may give them more agency in both the selection of clips and the focus of discussions. Through the aspects of the teaching-learning process that observers can notice, they are expected to develop competencies and dispositions that will later translate into instructional moves.	Provides an ecological approach to using video in teacher education or professional development contexts. These approaches consider in an integrated way the roles and influences of society, institutions, and individuals on teachers’ learning and pay greater attention to the use of videos in the context of schools and collaboration among groups of teachers.

The Field of Teacher Noticing: Different Theoretical Approaches 

A critical way in which video is used in teacher education and professional development is for the development of teacher noticing. The relational work of teaching and learning demands making multiple moment-to-moment decisions in the middle of a lesson. To accomplish this task, teachers must pay selective attention to the numerous events occurring within the classroom by considering the specific characteristics of their students, the context, and shaping those interactions. Moreover, teachers need to process that information by interpreting the phenomena in specialized ways (Sherin et al., 2011; van Es and Sherin, 2021), and finally, translate those processes into instructional moves framed in a specific context. The notion of teacher noticing encompasses the processes described above; however, research has approached it in diverse and fluid ways: from its origins linked to professional vision (Goodwin, 1994), transiting through a strong focus on cognitive aspects (van Es & Sherin, 2002), to recently grounding the discussion on social, cultural and political aspects (Louie, 2018). Research in the field of teacher noticing positions this construct as a central piece of their professional competence (Kaiser et al., 2015).

Recent systematic reviews (see König et al., 2022; Santagata et al., 2021) have proposed a characterization of four theoretical perspectives that research on teacher noticing has employed so far:

In the following, we summarize the fundamental characteristics of each of them as well as some general ideas for the design of learning experiences with video. The intent is to encourage clarity and critical use of theoretical approaches when deciding the learning goals and specific tasks teachers will be asked to complete.

 

This perspective has its origins in the work of researchers van Es and Sherin (2002), who focus their interest on the specialized ways in which teachers look at the phenomenon of teaching, elaborating on Goodwin’s (1994) work on professional vision. However, van Es and Sherin (2002) focus on three cognitive processes that occur in the teacher’s mind: identifying what is relevant in a classroom situation, making connections between what is observed and larger principles of teaching-learning, and using what is known about the context to reason about what occurred. In 2021, van Es and Sherin incorporated the “shaping” component of interactions as a process in which the teacher can obtain more information to reason about the event. During the last 20 years, different ways of characterizing noticing from this perspective have been disseminated, some of them incorporating the decision-making process as a final component (Jacobs et al., 2010; Kaiser et al., 2015). Moreover, some research groups (Seidel & Stürmer, 2014) have employed the term “professional vision,” but they have used a predominantly cognitive approach. 

As Santagata and colleagues (2021) explain, within the cognitive perspective, the design of learning experiences to develop teacher noticing using video can employ specific questions and requirements that direct observers’ attention to the details that the teacher educator expects them to reflect on. Emblematic researchers of this perspective have developed guidelines for the design and facilitation of video-based activities (Kang & van Es, 2019).

 

Goodwin (1994) presents the concept of Professional Vision, which corresponds to “socially organized ways of seeing and understanding events that are answerable to the distinctive interests of a particular group” (p. 606). In our case, how the professional community of teachers observes and makes sense of classroom phenomena. This specialized vision is socially situated, transcending individuals in their cognitive process of selective attention as the broader discourses of the profession influence it. 

Some scholars have brought to light how the cognitive perspective of teacher noticing has ignored the political and cultural aspects inherent in the Professional Vision (Lefstein & Snell, 2011; Louie, 2018). This has pushed the development of noticing proposals for equity, anti-deficit perspectives, and race (see Dominguez, 2019; Louie et al., 2021; Shah & Coles, 2020; van Es et al., 2022), which emanate within the socio-cultural perspective and come as a necessary response to the current problems of the educational system in the United States and internationally. 

Learning experiences situated under this noticing perspective, consequently, consider video as one of the artifacts that can mediate the socialization process that gradually allows co-constructing lenses to observe classroom phenomena in a situated way. This also implies analyzing how dominant discourses about teaching and learning frame participants’ noticing (Louie, 2018).

 

The work of mathematician John Mason (2002) supports this perspective, emphasizing the practice of researching oneself. Despite its origin and greater presence in mathematics education, this perspective applies to any knowledge domain. In this conceptualization of noticing, the development of different types of awareness (in action, in discipline, and in counsel; Mason, 1998) is promoted, focusing on internal processes for noticing at the time of teaching. Santagata et al. (2021) point out that video experiences under this perspective would seek “teachers to become aware of ways of seeing that they bring to classroom interactions, that might limit their ability to act freshly by attending to students’ in-the-moment contributions” (p. 121).

 

The field of teacher expertise research certainly encompasses many more aspects than noticing. The work of David Berliner (2001) and his research group is central to this perspective, highlighting the differences between the details of instruction that expert versus novice teachers may notice. The design of video observation tasks can be productively informed by the information obtained by analyzing the noticing of expert teachers, as Santagata and colleagues (2021) point out.

 

References

Berliner, D. C. (2001). Learning about and learning from expert teachers. International Journal of Educational Research, 35(5), 463–482. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0883-0355(02)00004-6

Brouwer, N. (2022). Using Video to Develop Teaching. Routledge.

Dominguez, H. (2019). Theorizing reciprocal noticing with non-dominant students in mathematics. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 102(1), 75–89. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-019-09896-5 

Goodwin, C. (1994). Professional vision. American Anthropologist, 96(3), 606–633. https://www.jstor.org/stable/682303 

Jacobs, V. R., Lamb, L. L., & Philipp, R. A. (2010). Professional noticing of children’s mathematical thinking. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 41(2), 169–202. https://doi.org/10.5951/jresematheduc.41.2.0169

Kang, H., & van Es, E. A. (2019). Articulating design principles for productive use of video in preservice education. Journal of Teacher Education, 70(3), 237-250. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487118778549

Lefstein, A., & Snell, J. (2011). Professional vision and the politics of teacher learning. Teaching and Teacher Education, 27(3), 505–514. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2010.10.004

Louie, N. L. (2018). Culture and ideology in mathematics teacher noticing. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 97(1), 55–69. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-017-9775-2 

Kaiser, G., Busse, A., Hoth, J., König, J., & Blömeke, S. (2015). About the complexities of video-based assessments: Theoretical and methodological approaches to overcoming shortcomings of research on teachers’ competence. International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education, 13(2), 369–387. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10763-015-9616-7 

König, J., Santagata, R., Scheiner, T., Adleff, A. K., Yang, X., & Kaiser, G. (2022). Teacher noticing: A systematic literature review of conceptualizations, research designs, and findings on learning to notice. Educational Research Review, 100453. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2022.100453

Mason, J. (1998). Enabling teachers to be real teachers: Necessary levels of awareness and structure of attention. Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, 1, 243–267. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009973717476 

Mason, J. (2002). Researching your own practice: The discipline of noticing. Routledge.

Santagata, R., König, J., Scheiner, T., Nguyen, H., Adleff, A.-K., Yang, X., et al. (2021). Mathematics teacher learning to notice: A systematic review of studies of video-based programs. ZDM-mathematics Education, 53, 119–134. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-020-01216-z 

Seidel, T., & Stürmer, K. (2014). Modeling and measuring the structure of professional vision in preservice teachers. American Educational Research Journal, 51(4), 739–771. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831214531321

Shah, N., & Coles, J. A. (2020). Preparing teachers to notice race in classrooms: Contextualizing the competencies of preservice teachers with antiracist inclinations. Journal of Teacher Education, 71(5), 584-599. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487119900204

Sherin, M. G., Jacobs, V. R., & Philipp, R. A. (2011). Situating the study of teacher noticing. In M. G. Sherin, V. R. Jacobs, & R. A. Philipp (Eds.), Mathematics teacher noticing: Seeing through teachers’ eyes (pp. 3–13). Routledge.

van Es, E. A., & Sherin, M. G. (2002). Learning to notice: Scaffolding new teachers’ interpretations of classroom interactions. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 10(4), 571–596.

van Es, E. A., & Sherin, M. G. (2021). Expanding on prior conceptualizations of teacher noticing. ZDM – Mathematics Education, 53(1), 17–27. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-020-01211-4 

van Es, E. A., Hand, V., Agarwal, P., & Sandoval, C. (2022). Multidimensional noticing for equity: Theorizing mathematics teachers’ systems of noticing to disrupt inequities. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 53(2), 114-132. https://doi.org/10.5951/jresematheduc-2019-0018